Black/Blue

J.M. Coetzee "On being photographed"

On Javier Marias's book Written Lives there is an essay on photographs of writers. Among the photographs reproduced is one of Samuel Beckett sitting in the corner of a bare room. Beckett looks wary, and indeed Marias describes his look as "hunted." The question is, hunted, hounded by what or whom? The most obvious answer is: hounded by the photographer. Did Beckett really decide of his own free will to sit in a corner, at the intersection of three dimensional axes, gazing upward, or did the photographer persuade him to sit there? In such a position, subjected to ten or twenty or thirty flashes of the camera, with a figure crouching over you, it is not too hard to feel hunted.

The fact is that photographers arrive for a shooting session with some preconception, often of a clichéd sort, of what kind of person their subject is, and strive to substantiate that cliché in the photographs they take (or, to follow the idiom of other languages, the photographs they make). Not only do they pose their subject as the cliché dictates, but when they return to their studio they select from among their shots those that come closest to the cliché. Thus we arrive at a paradox: the more time the photographer has to do justice to his subject, the less likely it is that justice will be done.